This is a very ominous story. As every state rushes to connect offices and hospitals with weak security and privacy together to exchange data, the federal government is giving doctors and hospitals tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars to install electronic health records that also lack ironclad security and also prevent patients from controlling their records. Hooking systems of ‘weak links’ to thousands of new systems that are also ‘weak links’ is a prescription for disaster.

Like the author, Patient Privacy Rights has been pointing out the abysmal state of health data security for years. What the author does not know is Congress LISTENED TO PATIENTS. Senator Snowe deserves credit for these consumer protections because she refused to allow the meaningful breach protections she crafted to be weakened. Powerful support by the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy (see our letter to Congress) helped convince Congress to put Senator Snowe’s tough breach reporting and tough penalties into the stimulus bill. Perhaps now those who hold our sensitive health data will start to take security seriously.

What is really new in this story are FairWarning’s report about the very high monthly frequency of breaches in doctor’s offices and major hospitals in the US and across the world. The statistics from FairWarning show clearly that the number of breaches officially reported to HHS are just the tip of the iceberg. See quotes:

200-bed hospital with a few small clinics, Rurally based: 24 confirmed incidents [breaches] per month.